More and More Businesses Are Using Clouds

Enterprises are now using an average of three public clouds and three private clouds, a survey released today from RightScale found.

In the past 12 months, private cloud adoption has soared from 63 percent to 77 percent. And this has driven hybrid cloud adoption, which up from 58 percent to 71 percent year-over-year.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to lead in public cloud adoption. But Azure (Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service) gained ground, and other, newer clouds such as DigitalOcean and Oracle Cloud are also hitting the radar of many enterprises.

Those are some of the key findings in RightScale's State of the Cloud Survey, which polled 1,060 technical professionals in January. Forty percent of those surveyed work in enterprises with more than 1,000 employees.

The Lure of Hybrid

The strong growth in private clouds, combined with the enterprise presence of public cloud, means a majority of organizations are now operating in hybrid environments. “We saw a big jump in the number using hybrid cloud from 58 percent last year to 71 percent this year," Kim Weins, VP of Marketing at RightScale, told CMSWire.

About 90 percent of enterprises continue to run applications in the cloud.

“Forrester takes the simple approach that hybrid cloud is ‘cloud plus anything.’ So it could be cloud plus another cloud. Hybrid could be when it [the organization] wants to use AWS but also wants to use Azure. Hybrid could be when the organization wants to use new elastic applications in the public cloud, but wants to leave the data for that application in the data center. Hybrid cloud is when organizations deploy two different components of an application in two different places,” he told CMSWire recently.

Fewer Security Concerns

According to Weins, the benefits of cloud computing, especially speed and convenience, are outweighing traditional angst over security. The only people still significantly worried about security are those who have yet to migrate to the cloud.

In fact, for the first time since the State of the Cloud Report in 2013, security has dropped off to as the top challenge in cloud. It is now second to human resources concerns.

Lack of resources and expertise increased from 27 percent last year to 32 percent this year to supplant security as the largest concern.

The number of enterprises running more than 1,000 virtual machines (VMs) in public cloud increased from 13 percent to 17 percent, while those running more than 1,000 VMs in private cloud grew from 22 percent to 31 percent

In comparison, enterprises with virtualized environments containing more than 1,000 VMs, grew from 42 percent to 48 percent.

Docker and DevOps

Adoption of both Docker and DevOps have skyrocketed over the past year, the report found.

DevOps adoption has risen from 66 to 74 percent, with enterprises reaching 81 percent. Docker adoption more than doubled to 27 percent from 13 percent in 2015. Another 35 percent have plans to use Docker.

One further figure with noting is the number of enterprises that have expressed concern about the cost of cloud management and particularly hybrid management.

The number of enterprises that cited cost of cloud management as a concern has risen to 26 percent, up from 18 percent in the 2013 report.

The report also points out that cloud cost management provides a significant opportunity for savings, since few companies are taking critical actions to optimize cloud costs, such as shutting down unused workloads or selecting lower-cost cloud or regions.

“Cloud cost management is complex because it has a lot of moving parts," Weins said.